Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

For two thousand years, cadavers have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery, cadavers have been there alongside surgeons, making history in their quiet way.

My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Follow New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach - but be careful not to trip - as she weaves through personal anecdotes and everyday musings riddled with her uncanny wit and amazingly analytical eye. These essays, which found a well-deserved home within the pages of Reader's Digest as the column "My Planet," detail the inner workings of hypochondriacs, hoarders, and compulsive cheapskates. (Did we mention neurotic interior designers and professional list makers?) For Roach, humor is hidden in the most unlikely places, which means that nothing is off limits.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

Best-selling author Mary Roach returns with a new adventure to the invisible realm we carry around inside. Roach takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: The questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars. Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts?

Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War

Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries - panic, exhaustion, heat, noise - and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them. Mary Roach dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper.

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

Space is a world devoid of the things we need to live and thrive: air, gravity, hot showers, fresh produce, privacy, beer. Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much can a person give up? How much weirdness can they take? What happens to you when you can’t walk for a year? Have sex? Smell flowers? What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a space walk? Is it possible for the human body to survive a bailout at 17,000 miles per hour?

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

Most people want to avoid thinking about death, but Caitlin Doughty - a 20-something with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre - took a job at a crematory, turning morbid curiosity into her life’s work. With an original voice that combines fearless curiosity and mordant wit, Caitlin tells an unusual coming-of-age story full of bizarre encounters, gallows humor, and vivid characters (both living and very dead).

Dr. Mutter's Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine

Imagine undergoing an operation without anesthesia performed by a surgeon who refuses to sterilize his tools - or even wash his hands. This was the world of medicine when Thomas Dent Mütter began his trailblazing career as a plastic surgeon in Philadelphia during the middle of the 19th century. Although he died at just 48, Mütter was an audacious medical innovator who pioneered the use of ether as anesthesia, the sterilization of surgical tools, and a compassion-based vision for helping the severely deformed, which clashed spectacularly with the sentiments of his time.

Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

Just two months before the September 11 terrorist attacks, Dr. Judy Melinek began her training as a New York City forensic pathologist. With her husband and their toddler holding down the home front, Judy threw herself into the fascinating world of death investigation-performing autopsies, investigating death scenes, and counseling grieving relatives. Working Stiff chronicles Judy's two years of training, taking listeners behind the police tape of some of the most harrowing deaths in the Big Apple.

Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt

In this macabre and moving compilation, funeral directors across the country share their most embarrassing, jaw-dropping, irreverent, and deeply poignant stories about life at death's door. Discover what scares them and what moves them to tears. Learn about rookie mistakes and why death sometimes calls for duct tape. Enjoy tales of the dearly departed spending eternity naked from the waist down and getting bottled and corked - in a wine bottle.

This Is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

A riveting investigation of the myriad ways that parasites control how other creatures - including humans - think, feel, and act. These tiny organisms can live only inside another animal, and, as McAuliffe reveals, they have many evolutionary motives for manipulating their host's behavior. Far more often than appreciated, these puppeteers orchestrate the interplay between predator and prey.

A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization

Guns, germs, and steel might have transformed us from hunter-gatherers into modern man, but booze, sex, trash talk, and tripping built our civilization. Cracked editor Robert Evans brings his signature dogged research and lively insight to uncover the many and magnificent ways vice has influenced history, from the prostitute-turned-empress who scored a major victory for women's rights to the beer that helped create - and destroy - South America's first empire.

Wicked Takes the Witness Stand: A Tale of Murder and Twisted Deceit in Northern Michigan

On a bitterly cold afternoon in December 1986, a Michigan State trooper found the frozen body of Jerry Tobias in the bed of his pickup truck. The 31-year-old oil field worker and small-time drug dealer was clad only in jeans, a checkered shirt, and cowboy boots. Inside the cab of the truck was a fresh package of expensive steaks from a local butcher shop, the first lead in a case that would be quickly lost in a thicket of bungled forensics, shady prosecution, and a psychopathic star witness out for revenge.

Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets

In 1953, a 27-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison - who suffered from severe epilepsy - received a radical new version of the then-common lobotomy, targeting the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry's seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry was left profoundly amnesic, unable to create long-term memories. Over the next 60 years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience.

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

Colin Dickey is on the trail of America's ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie homes", Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places.

Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us About Crime

The dead talk - to the right listener. They can tell us all about themselves: where they came from, how they lived, how they died, and, of course, who killed them. Forensic scientists can unlock the mysteries of the past and help serve justice using the messages left by a corpse, a crime scene, or the faintest of human traces.

But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present as If It Were the Past

We live in a culture of casual certitude. This has always been the case, no matter how often that certainty has failed. Though no generation believes there's nothing left to learn, every generation unconsciously assumes that what has already been defined and accepted is (probably) pretty close to how reality will be viewed in perpetuity. And then, of course, time passes. Ideas shift. Opinions invert. What once seemed reasonable eventually becomes absurd, replaced by modern perspectives that feel even more irrefutable and secure - until, of course, they don't.

The Elephant in the Room: A Journey into the Trump Campaign and the "Alt-Right"

'But Hillary is a known Luciferian,' he tried. 'She's not a known Luciferian,' I said. 'Well, yes and no,' he said. In The Elephant in the Room, Jon Ronson, the New York Times best-selling author of The Psychopath Test, Them, and So You've Been Publicly Shamed, travels to Cleveland at the height of summer to witness the Republican National Convention.

When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain: History's Unknown Chapters

The first installment in Giles Milton's outrageously entertaining series, History's Unknown Chapters: colorful and accessible, intelligent and illuminating, Milton shows his customary historical flair as he delves into the little-known stories from the past. There's the cook aboard the Titanic who pickled himself with whiskey and survived in the icy seas where most everyone else died. There's the man who survived the atomic bombs in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And there are many, many more.

No Stone Unturned: The True Story of the World's Premier Forensic Investigators

No Stone Unturned recreates the genesis of NecroSearch International: a small ,eclectic group of scientists and law enforcement personal, active and retired, who volunteer their services to help locate the clandestine graves of murder victims and recover the remains and evidence to assist with the apprehension and conviction of the killers.

Idiot Brain: What Your Head Is Really up To

In Idiot Brain, Dr. Dean Burnett celebrates blind spots, blackouts, insomnia, and all the other downright laughable things our minds do to us while also exposing the many mistakes we've made in our quest to understand how our brains actually work. This is the best kind of popular science - lucid, funny, and whip smart - from a debut author who will be tickling funny bones and firing neurons for a long time to come.

Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster

At 01:23:40 on April 26th 1986, Alexander Akimov pressed the emergency shutdown button at Chernobyl's fourth nuclear reactor. It was an act that forced the permanent evacuation of a city, killed thousands, and crippled the Soviet Union. The event spawned decades of conflicting, exaggerated, and inaccurate stories.

Cook County ICU: 30 Years of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases

Author Cory Franklin, MD, who headed the hospital's intensive care unit from the 1970s through the 1990s, shares his most unique and bizarre experiences, including the deadly Chicago heatwave of 1995, treating the first AIDS patients in the country before the disease was diagnosed, the nurse with rare Munchausen syndrome, the only surviving ricin victim, and the professor with Alzheimer's hiding the effects of the wrong medication.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

One of the comedy world's fastest-rising stars tells his wild coming of age story during the twilight of apartheid in South Africa and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed. Noah provides something deeper than traditional memoirists: powerfully funny observations about how farcical political and social systems play out in our lives.

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

Growing up in the suburban hell of Misery Saga (aka Mississauga), Lizzie has never liked the way she looks - even though her best friend, Mel, says she's the pretty one. She starts dating guys online, but she's afraid to send pictures, even when her skinny friend, China, does her makeup: She knows no one would want her if they could really see her. So she starts to lose weight. With punishing drive, she counts almonds consumed, miles logged, pounds dropped. She fights her way into coveted dresses.

Publisher's Summary

"What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that - the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?"

In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die. She begins the journey in rural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the way, she enrolls in an English medium school, gets electromagnetically haunted at a university in Ontario, and visits a Duke University professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of "ectoplasm" in a Cambridge University archive.

I thought this was an interesting read. She gives many examples of the possibility for our hope of an afterlife from the belivers point of view as well as from the skeptics. It is not really a book to convince you we do or don't go on after death but gives some compelling examples to support this and also explanations for how they could be misinterpreted. I personally like the book and found the readers presentation to be enjoyable. I also found it to be a good book for provoking thought.

Entertainingly written exploration of ghosts, ectoplasm, mediums, and other paranormal phenomena. Roach, a thorough skeptic about all these, has a droll style of writing, but reader Bernadette Quigley's attempt to emphasize the drollness is exceedingly annoying, with sudden hushes to whisper volume, portentous pauses and shifts in tone, arch intonations, and the very bad accents another reviewer has mentioned. The performance was almost bad enough for me to ditch the whole book, but I persevered.

To preface this, let me say I have never written a review of anything before, but I feel compelled to do so now. I love Mary Roach's writing style and sense of humor! "Stiff," has been a favorite read, so I was thrilled to see other works by her available on Audible. Anxious for, what I thought would be an enjoyable experience, turned out to be torture. I am an easy-going person who normally can persevere until the end, but after the first two chapters, I couldn't take it any longer. The narrator ruined the experience - more eloquently described by previous reviewers - in such a horrendous way that I will waste this book credit. I will, however, download the book onto my Kindle and enjoy it, as I recommend you do, in the written form.

I like Mary Roach partly for her skepticism, it's true. But while I don't want to be hurtful to the performer, I had a hard time listening to the snide, snarky tone that sounded like the schoolyard bullying that I hear in the hallways of the middle school where I work. It undermined the value of the book.

An examination of life after death as only Mary Roach can provide. Funny, insightful and entertaining. My only complaint is the Narrator's insistence on attempting the accents of the various people Roach quotes. Not only were they poorly rendered, to the point of caracature, but distracting and unecessary.

The book is mildly interesting, but the narrator ruined it for me. When she is reading in her natural voice, she reads well. But when she tries to inject an accent, or (worse yet) tries to sound as if she is a scientific professional, it’s so over-the-top, it ruins the book.

What was most disappointing about Mary Roach’s story?

Very little current information... this book dwells on 19th century experiments.

Would you be willing to try another one of Bernadette Quigley’s performances?

I really enjoyed Mary Roach's other books and seeing that I don't think I'm hard to please, I shrugged off the other comments about the narrator.
I was able to make through all of one hour before being utterly disgusted.

Jeez! I avoided this book for years, frightened away by the moans and groans over Bernadette Quigley's reading. Yes, it is a bit odd. But it's not bad. Indeed, it's rather sweet. And heck, her accents are no worse than mine. Indeed, they're better. All my accents sound the same. And anyway, Mary Roach is always -- always! -- worthwhile. The woman is a national treasure. I can't wait to see what's next...

Let me start off by saying that I absolutely loved Mary Roach's 3 other books available on Audible. She has a real talent for using narratives of her personal experiences to bring scientific and historical topics to life. I guess that's what I'd consider the first mistake that lead to the existence of this audiobook: the majority of "Spook" is simply not science (no matter what the psychics and ghost-hunters believe) and Roach's skepticism is never challenged in any interesting ways. In this case, the lens of her personal experience serves to deaden (sorry) the topics explored, because the fact that it's all garbage is a foregone conclusion, so why bother suffering through it with her? Certain sections (I'm looking at you, ectoplasm) are far too long already, and the author's attitude makes them even more tedious.

The second travesty here is the narration. When portraying everyone other than the author's voice, the narrator sounds like... like my drunken uncle doing impressions of family members after Christmas dinner, but with even more petty meanness. In a book where the author is already too dismissive of the subject matter to make it particularly interesting, the narrator does no favors by making every single person interviewed sound completely ridiculous. Ordinarily, the narrator's over-dramatic reading of Roach's delightfully deadpan writing style would be unfortunate on its own, but combined with all the other problems it makes this audiobook nearly valueless.

All in all, I wish I'd never downloaded this - although there is a moderate amount of interesting content - because the whole endeavor makes me think less of the author. I enjoyed her other books so much, it was almost like she was a friend - and now I've seen a side of her that I find a bit distasteful. She is very talented, but the message of the audiobook seems to boil down to "silly people believe silly things," and it doesn't strike me as a good use of anyone's time - either the listener's or the author's.

I'm not to sure if I'd purchase an audible or hard copy of any of Mary Roach's books again. I still haven't decided if it was the narrator I didn't enjoy or the actual content.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Bernadette Quigley?

I have no idea who I would've cast as a narrator, but it sure as hell wouldn't have been Bernadette Quigley. I COULD NOT stand the snotty way she interpreted Mary Roach's opinions. Nor could I stand the way she felt the need to use an accent for every person that is quoted in the book. Specifically, the Middle Eastern doctor in the chapter about reincarnation. Totally and absolutely obnoxious.

If you could give Spook a new subtitle, what would it be?

Spook: When a close-minded skeptic continues being a close-minded skeptic

Any additional comments?

I only finished this audio book because I paid for it. Otherwise, it wouldn't been deleted after chapter two. The only things I actually enjoyed were learning about some of the scientific/medical aspects of the search for the afterlife.